Thief of Hearts
by I.C. Weener
Summary: I might be getting a little carried away with this gimmick.


" _Kali Ma something something something."_

\- the guy from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

 _"*that fight sequence from the original Dumb & Dumber*"_

\- Jim Carrey

* * *

The empty athletic field of Kyoto International School was a wonderful place for two femme fatale agents sent from opposing factions to have a vicious battle to the death. Alisa's robotic right arm had transformed into a screaming power saw hanging an inch away from her opponent's neck. Xiaoyu had both of her hands locked around Alisa's upper arm to block her from getting any closer. Alisa's left hand was hanging idly at her side.

"Come on, Alisa. You've been spying on me all along and now you're trying to kill me. Is a lousy chainsaw all you've got?" Xiaoyu grinned fearlessly, but there was still a feeling of hurt hiding in her eyes. They were best friends ten minutes ago. Ten minutes ago, she thought Alisa was just an oddly dressed but average human.

"I think I'll be taking everything _you've_ got," Alisa replied forebodingly, firmly putting her own feelings of regret on hold.

The fingers of the mechanical girl's empty hand twitched playfully at her hip. All at once, while Xiaoyu still had her arms raised blocking the chainsaw and left herself open for a low strike, Alisa lifted her left arm and lashed her hand forward with rocket velocity. Her optical sensors used the decorative orange flower print hugging Xiaoyu's chest as a targeting reticule to pinpoint the unblockable attack. Her fist tore through the front of Xiaoyu's qipao, plunged through her skin, and shattered her sternum. Her white glove remained sunken between Xiaoyu's breasts for only a second.

"Guh!..." Xiaoyu exclaimed in a soft gasp. Her fate was sealed as Alisa's iron fingers painfully closed around her thumping vital core. The young baguazhang master was about to make history as the world's first patient to receive a full-blown cardiolectomy fully awake, standing up, with absolutely no help from anesthesia, in record time, and mid-fight.

Alisa snapped her arm back out just as suddenly and ruthlessly as it went in. Her fist returned drenched in blood and beating rapidly. Her opponent's heart was clenched in her fingers like a fresh tomato squirting out of its stem.

Xiaoyu stumbled backward with her eyes wide open and her mouth slightly agape. She stared vacantly with streams of blood seeping down the sides of her mouth for a moment, before lifelessly flopping backwards into the grass. Her body twitched for another few seconds after it expired. Her face remained frozen in agonized horror as it stared up into the bright blue sky. If this fight had an announcer, she would most certainly be declaring Alisa the winner right around now.

The power saw on the robot girl's right arm came to a stop and elegantly folded back into her forearm. Billions of scurrying nanomachines emerged from her fingers on her left hand to clean and dry her fighting/surgical glove while rapidly building a plastic membrane around the heart. The casing was equipped with a capacitor that ran off Alisa's secondary power and administered a small constant pulse to keep the excavated muscle alive.

The top of Alisa's satin blouse peeled open like a zipper and provided access to the panels of her chest compartment. Her artificial breasts opened like they were hanging from cupboard doors and revealed a modest amount of storage space within the framework of her steel ribs. She tucked the preserved heart beside the whirling power generator in her chest and sighed as everything sealed back up in an automated process.

Alisa looked down at herself with both of her gloved palms delicately resting on the front of her blouse. A small compassionate smile crossed her lips.

"Don't worry, Xiaoyu," she whispered gently. "We don't have to fight anymore. You're safe with me."

She peered across the grass to catch a final glimpse of Xiaoyu's discarded husk and made a visual note of the details. An orange qipao with white feathers around her shoulders. Front and back flaps hanging down to her knees over silver silk shorts. A massive hole and a bloodstain where the flower print should have been. She looked so outdated.

Alisa calmly turned away and pressed her pinkie and index fingers to the side of her ear. A high-pitched electrical chirp echoed through her eardrum as she opened a private frequency. She spoke through a built-in microphone.

"Target down. Returning to base with perishable salvage."

She spread her metal angel wings and blasted off on jet thrusters until she was a tiny pink and purple speck in the sky.

* * *

The sleek and state-of-the-art Mishima machine called the Xiaoyu Fabricator finished its top secret function. Alisa rested her gloved palm against a flat authorization scanner and whispered the phrase " _The marmalade finch gives up her beetroot when the lilac blossoms_ " in backwards Russian.

The shutters of the narrow metallic chamber slid open and spewed fog as the air from its supercooled interior met the dusty heat of the outside factory air. The mist dissipated, revealing a perfect 1-to-1 android copy of Xiaoyu.

She was sleeping on her feet in a nest of tangled wires. The orange qipao she was wearing was distinctly hers, but the black feathers decorating her shoulders and the shorter skirt flaps hanging down to her thighs conveyed a more sporty and modern taste in fashion. Her black nylon shorts, her thigh stockings, and her mismatched arm wraps (the one on her left was just a black and gold gauntlet covering her wrist, while the one on her right was a black and gold fingerless glove that reached all the way up to her elbow) gave her some extra Alisa-inspired quirk.

The tinwoman only needed a heart.

Alisa stood with her metal sternum lined up with Xiaoyu's and used her thumb to carefully nudge a manual override button hidden under the skin near Xiaoyu's armpit. The flower pattern on the front of Xiaoyu's dress rotated like a lock being turned and her torso compartment opened with a hydraulic whisk. Alisa removed the still-beating heart from her own stacked shelf and carefully latched it in place into Xiaoyu's hollow bust. Once the heart was integrated into her systems, Xiaoyu's alloy ribs protectively locked around it and her chest panels sealed up automatically.

Alisa stepped back and curiously waited.

Xiaoyu's eyelashes twitched as she came online. She was being resurrected with a fresh outlook that would never resent Alisa as a spy and never judge her for being a robot (since now they were both technically robots). Now they could just be two cogs working together in the system called life.

Xiaoyu's eyes popped open into awareness. She shrugged off the bed of wires surrounding her and gracefully walked out of the manufacturing equipment. She peered toward her android sister-unit, tilted her head, and blinked.

"Hi Alisa!" she said cheerfully and innocently, as if she wasn't an evil robotic clone who had just had her heart gruesomely transported from a real body to prosthetic one.

Alisa smiled back at her.

"I'm sorry I had to put you through this," she said in soft and genuine remorse, "But I'm glad you've recovered so quickly. Are you feeling well?"

"I just have a little heartburn," Xiaoyu replied while her fingers scratched her chest. "But, hey, it beats getting a brainfreeze!"

* * *

 _Author's note: Doki doki, motherfuckers._

 _Author's note 2: Her robot design is just her outfit from the Tekken mobile game. Because it's *Mobile* Xiaoyu. Get it?_


End file.
